


for the moment

by BookThievery



Series: Meantime [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Long Distance Relationship, and lots of wishing, featuring video chats, from us east coast to paris
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 15:47:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BookThievery/pseuds/BookThievery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's ten at night on the east coast. It's three in the morning in Paris.</p>
<p>Cosette isn't asleep yet, Marius has just woken up, neither are fully awake, but they don't really care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for the moment

**Author's Note:**

> Long Distance Relationship AU. Featuring video chats and phone calls and lots of wishing.

It’s three in the morning in Paris.

Somewhere back in time, Cosette hasn’t gone to bed yet.

She needs to finish this paper. She has two more days left for it, plenty of pages to get through, and she doesn’t want to disappoint her professor. The professor is nice and funny, and understands that there are some subjects and discussions Cosette can’t sit through in class comfortably.

She has another paper she needs to get started on, but she has weeks to finish that, and the professor in the class is her father, so she thinks she's safe.

He’d called her three hours earlier to ask about her day and say goodnight, as he did every night. If Cosette was not Cosette, or if she was an average college student, or a rebellious one, she would have been embarrassed by this. But she’s always been close to her father. She misses him on days where she doesn’t get to see him, and she can talk to him for hours at a time and still be sad when one of them has to go. She doesn’t get to see as much of him as she used to, but she wanted to get a dorm room, move out, grow up just a little bit. (She wanted a roommate, actually. She didn't get one, which most college students would celebrate. Not Cosette.)

At some point, she stops typing her paper and instead begins typing something that is half story and half diary. She’s tired. The words on the screen blur before her eyes, but it's not until she startles awake after falling asleep on her hand that she decides it's time for bed. She can feel a red mark on her cheek where her hand was holding up her head.

She saves both word documents, closes the internet, and goes to shut off the computer when a little box appears in the corner and her laptop _dings_ and her entire body throws off every sign of exhaustion at the name in the online box.

She’s about to click to start a video call, but he beats her to it.

“It’s three in the morning, Marius.” Is the first thing Cosette says as his face fills the screen.

Marius only laughs.

He looks exhausted. He has bags under his eyes that aren’t incredibly prominent, but they look like bruises to Cosette, who can’t do anything but smile at him through the screen. She wants to kiss them away. She wants to tell him to go to sleep, but the only reason he’s awake right now is to talk to her, and Cosette wants to be just a little selfish, just right now.

His hair is messy. His pajama shirt – something she sent him last month, she notes with a little surprise and a lot of warmth – is wrinkled. He rests his head on his closed hand, his smile lazy but happy.

“Did you just wake up?” He nods. “Nightmares?” She asks.

Marius has always had bad nightmares. Most children grow out of the night terrors and frights, but he never got that gift of growing up. He’s never known whether to think of them as a brain chemistry thing or a deeper, subconscious thing. Some nights, they’re silly nightmares, like being chased by a giant flamingo with human teeth, or a poisonous toothbrush, or some other strange thing. Marius will have a laugh at himself and his brain as soon as his heart stops racing. Other nights, they’re much worse.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he says, and she smiles at him, wishing, not for the first or the last time, that she could step through the computer and to him, and wrap her arms around him and just hold him, to be there in person and not just be a face on the screen.

“Why are you still awake?” Ten at night is not late for Cosette. She can pull all-nighters like a pro and still be her sweet self in the morning (though not without her coffee.)

“I was writing a paper and half-writing a story.”

He smiles at her and asks about them.

 

They talk for a while about the paper and the story, and then they talk for a little bit about Cosette's father, and then about Marius and his group of friends, and neither of them mention Cosette’s lack of really close friends, but he can tell that she’s thinking of it and she can tell that he knows, and Marius makes a few half-hearted jokes to try and cheer her up.

They’re mostly awkward ones that make Cosette laugh not because they’re funny, but because they’re such _Marius_ things to say.

There’s a long moment of silence. It’s not uncomfortable, but Cosette longs to fill it, to say _something_ , _do_ something. She plays with the edge of her pajama shirt, and then it dawns on her that Marius might want to talk about his nightmares now.

(He’s shared most of them with her, from the silly ones to the unsettling ones. Sometimes he doesn’t want to talk about them, and she will leave it at that, and sometimes he says he doesn’t but he actually does, and Cosette learned a while ago how to tell the difference.)

“What scared you so much?” She whispers.

Five hours away, Marius’s shoulders sag. “I lost you.” He says, and when he meets her eyes there’s tears there.

Her stomach tightens painfully and tears gather at her own eyes. The words and the tears in his eyes open up her chest and leave it aching. One hand of hers is still playing with the edge of her pajama shirt. The other rests on her laptop’s keyboard, the closest she can get to grasping his hand.

“I’m not going anywhere.” She promises.

The smile he gives her both makes the ache in her chest grow and makes her feel impossibly light and _happy_.

"It’s three a.m., Marius. Go get some sleep.”

“It’s only ten,” he shoots back at her. He wipes furiously at one of his eyes, laughing because he’s still trying not to cry. “I’ll call you about four, okay?”

“I’ll talk to you at nine.”

And she blows a kiss to the screen – it’s all she can do, really – and smiles and logs off, shuts her laptop down, and crawls into her bed, buries herself under all the blankets. She lets her head hit her pillow. She tries and fails not to cry, curled up in on herself, wishing and wishing and wishing. 

(Wishes have never helped before, because in the morning she will still be here, and he will still be in Paris, and they will still have thousands of miles and five hours between them.

It feels like too much distance, too wide of a chasm.

Cosette doesn’t care.)


End file.
